Foreword by Shaun Woodward MP

T-Shirts and Suits: A Guide to the Business of Creativity

Reprinted with new foreword by Shaun Woodward MP, Minister for Creative Industries and Tourism

"The creative industries are hugely important to the UK’s economy and they are only going to become more important in the future.

If that future is going to be bright for our creative industries, we need our small and medium sized businesses to have sound business skills and a strong entrepreneurial base. That’s an essential driver of growth and prosperity in a modern economy. 

But at this moment in time, the average life span of an SME business in the UK is just 24 months.  It’s at that point that a poorly conceived business strategy begins to show the cracks.

How can we stop that happening? How can we prolong the life expectancy of a creative business and turn it into the success it sets out to be? This is something that we are exploring through our Creative Economy Programme, which we launched at the end of 2005. 

We have established working groups for each of the key themes of the programme one of which is business support and access to finance.  Creativity and business skills don’t always go hand in hand – but both are needed to succeed in the 21st century.  There are two schools of thought: that there are left sided brain and right sided brains and never the twain shall meet; or, that those working in the creative and cultural fields just don’t do business because they’ve never had the training and support to do so.  What this dilemma demonstrates is that there is a management skills gap and we need to address this.

The ‘T-shirts and Suits’ approach to management brings together creative thinking and business skills.  As a publication, T-shirts and Suits provides examples of how creative and business brains can merge to give birth to – and sustain – successful enterprises.  The book illustrates how the best business ideas and concepts can be used in the context of creative enterprises.

David Parrish has used his knowledge and experience to articulate and illustrate essential business principles in a way which is appealing to creative entrepreneurs.  As such, T-shirts and Suits makes an important contribution to the management skills of creative entrepreneurs and consequently to the success of their enterprises.

I would like to congratulate David – and Merseyside ACME – for bringing this business guide to the creative industries at large and to the individual businesses that will no doubt benefit from reading it."

 

Shaun Woodward MP